RAND Study: Hospital Ratings should Provide Patients with Data so they Choose Based on what's most important to them

Hospital ratings tools can be more patient-friendly, researchers at RAND Corporation say.

According to a new study, while hospital rankings show how well different providers are performing, a more personalized experience can make those data more usable for patients and researchers.

A prototype that was capable of improving that experience was developed by RAND Corporation who leveraged data from the Centers for Medicare &Medicaid Services’ Hospital Compare site. Users are able to use the tool to weigh measures in the star ratings based on their preferences and requirements.

For example, a patient seeking the best hospital for obstetrics care may not necessarily weigh readmission rates as highly as another patient would. Mark Friedberg, M.D., director of RAND’s Boston Office and the study’s senior author in an interview with news outlet said that composite scores make those value judgments for the user, cutting down an element of choice.

“Every public score should have these features so people can personalize the ranking for what they need,” Friedberg said.

Users are able to use the RAND tool to search for local hospitals and then assign weights to seven metrics: safety of care; readmissions; mortality; patient experience; effectiveness of care; timeliness of care and efficient use of medical imaging. By adjusting the weights for these measures, users could see an entirely different star rating and rank for local facilities.

According to Friedberg, the RAND tool is also useful to researchers, who may be seeking data they can better customize. It would also allow providers who may earn low scores from CMS or on other rankings to dig more into where they can improve.

Since the world has gone digital, it’s much simpler to offer tools that allow people to get more granular with measurement data, Friedberg said. When reports like CMS’ were in print, having just the composite measure made far more sense.

Friedberg noted that that the RAND tool was the first step towards finding a personalized way to view hospital rankings and that further research and modifications are needed to offer a tool that would be really useful for patients.

Patients, for example, are unlikely to have the health literacy to effectively determine how much value they place on something such as “effectiveness of care,” and what exactly a measure like that means can vary from person to person. But, Friedberg said, that doesn’t change that future hospital ranking systems could benefit from more personalization features.

One beneficial tweak, for instance, could be to ask certain survey questions up front to help patients better understand how their priorities translate to clinical measures, he said